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Heliotropia 7.1-2 (2010) http://www.heliotropia.org least one crucial detail of innovation. Boccaccio’s text twice insists on the final destination of the water that the fountain at the center of the garden so forcefully pours forth. In what may appear at first reading as a mere quantitative simile, the authorial voice suggests that the water “might have been enough to propel a millstone”; at the end of the passage, the millstone comes back as a literal presence outside the garden but intimately connected to it: the water, “verso il pian discendendo chiarissima, avanti che a quel divenisse, con grandissima forza e con non piccola utilità del signore due mulina volgea.” Of course, a simple argument could always be made that the detail of the millstone is motivated merely by extra-literary circumstances: Boccaccio adds a millstone to his villa description because the villa he imagines as the backdrop for the next two days of story-telling actually had one. Barring unforeseen archeological discoveries, the claim cannot be proved — and the argument perhaps is to be discarded. 18 To an argument a rebus one may add a converging, and perhaps more compelling, argument a verbis: what at first makes its appearance in the text as a simile is then materialized. The fountain’s water which started out “as if it could move a millstone” is in the end described as actually “moving a millstone — or two.” Both arguments, however, risk missing the central cultural point the text is probably making. When set alongside the Rose, the Decameron appears to be insisting on the practical function of the fountain. In addition to the aesthetic pleasure that the garden-dwellers may derive from the admirable, gushing fountain and the murmuring streams and rivulets, something that unites them with the compaignie of the Rose, the signore of this garden has designed it so that it may offer at once pleasure and profit, diletto and utilità. 19 Pleasure and profit, were already explicitly (albeit incidentally) at the core of the Filocolo passage. In the context of that work, time well spent was at once pleasurable and useful: the irrigation system of the present garden replicates that ideal verbal setting in its architecture. In their longue durée, the notions thus joined represent Boccaccio’s distinctive and contrasting signature. The garden of Deduit, with its cortège of idleness and levity, was all about pleasure and in no way about profit. Once we put 18 Having no investment in promoting a specific site, I will refrain from putting Boccaccio’s villa on any map. Traditionally, however, Villa Palmieri has been considered the strongest candidate. See, for instance, C. Bichi and M. Zoppi, Giardini di Toscana (Firenze: Edifir, 2001). 19 For an analysis of the two terms in the Decameron, see R. Hollander “Utilità,” in Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 69-88. http://www.heliotropia.org/07/marchesi.pdf 46
Heliotropia 7.1-2 (2010) http://www.heliotropia.org this feature of Boccaccio’s garden in focus, its presence acquires the value of a precise antithetical statement, one specifically targeting the Roman de la Rose. The pursuit of utility-with-pleasure is the specific difference that separates the members of Boccaccio’s brigata from the court of love they intertextually mimic. It may not be a random coincidence that the dialectics between pleasure and profit, beauty and usefulness, can be found in a different, and for Boccaccio radically alternative tradition. Amoenitas and utilitas are at the core of Classical treatments of villa gardens. In Roman literature, discussions of how the country estates owned by the cultivated ruling class should look like and what purposes they should serve was entrusted to the contrastive terminological couple we find joined in Boccaccio. The theme, first expounded in Varro’s De re rustica, reaches as far as Pliny the Younger. In the summer of 2005, while collaborating on a study of Boccaccio’s use of Livy in the Decameron, an Italian colleague, Professor Gaetano Braccini, directed my attention to two epistles by Pliny, which are devoted to a detailed, painstakingly precise and yet fully literary, description of two of his country estates. 20 Ep. II.17 presents the Laurentine villa (a property Pliny owned on the coast of Latium); Ep. V.6 repeats the ekphrastic exercise for a second villa, one he owned in Tuscany. 21 While the coupling of amoenitas and utilitas is spelled out in the first letter, it is the second one that may be more interesting to readers of Boccaccio. Below, I quote the text of this second epistle almost in its entirety. In addition to the group I have listed above, I have now bolded other loci in the epistle that may be suggested as antecedents for descriptive and thematic details in the Decameron. In what may appear a perverse chronological order, I am now glossing Pliny with Boccaccio: C. PLINIUS DOMITIO APOLLINARI SUOS. 20 See G. Braccini and S. Marchesi, “Livio XXV, 26 e l’Introduzione alla prima giornata: di una possibile tessera classica per il cominciamento del Decameron,” Italica 80.2 (2003), 139–46. The notes that follow about the resonance of Pliny’s description of his gardens are deeply indebted to my conversations with Professor Braccini. 21 For Pliny’s treatment of villas in an archeological and cultural vein, see G. Mansuelli, “La villa nelle Epistulae di C. Plinio Cecilio Secondo,” Studi Romagnoli 29 (1978), 59– 76; J. Bodel, “Monumental villas and villa monuments,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 10 (1997), 5–35; and A. Riggsby, “Pliny in Space (and Time),” Arethusa 36 (2003), 167–86. J. S. Ackerman’s vast study The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) clearly outlines the cultural debates surrounding the Roman estates (for Pliny’s case, see Chapter 2). For literary meditations on villas, see most recently J. Henderson, Morals and Villas in Seneca’s “Letters”: Places to Dwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). http://www.heliotropia.org/07/marchesi.pdf 47
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